A well watered garden

In the previous blogs, I had mentioned the challenges we were facing with watering the plants daily. It requires too much effort to water individual pots, which is why most of our plants died. Sometime they received too much attention (water) and sometime too little. Plus, it made life difficult for us if we wanted to go on a holiday. While friends can turn on the tap, it's a big ask to get them to spend 30 mins watering each pot.

Anyway, with all that sorted, we let our small collection of plants flourish. I'll let the pictures do all the talking!

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Bougainviillea

Potato plants

Of course, where there is water, there are weeds. This plant came up in the Chikoo tree pot by itself. I'm letting it live as it has nice flowers and is a ground cover.

Common Purslane

We also bought some new plants, now that we can look after them. The yellow flowering plant is called Tecoma. It is shrub that produces trumpet shaped flowers. It grows in abundance in Ahmedabad, so should be alright throughout the year without demanding too much.

Tecoma

I also saw a Tibouchina. It was more expensive than the other plants, but I hope that it wll tie our two gardens together - Melbourne and Ahmedabad. It looks as lovely as ever, with purple flowers and hairy green leaves.

Tibouchina

Giloy - a gift

My parents always bring plants and seeds for us when they visit or give them when we visit them. Most of them do not survive the heat of Ahmedabad. But one did. And this one taught me the importance of growing native plants, that suit Indian conditions. 

This plant is called Giloy (गिलोई). It has several ayurvedic benefits, the most important one being to keep recurring fever in check. This makes it very useful for curing dengue. In recent years, the demand for it has increased as people have realised it's effectiveness for dengue. Aptly, it flourishes in the monsoon and grows everywhere. 

Mom gave me a stem cutting from her collection the day I was leaving after a visit. I kept it in my bag. And then promptly forgot about it when I got back home! I only remembered 4 days later. I wasnt sure whether it would still survive, but it did strike. Within a week of planting, it produced two leaves. 

And when the monsoon came in full swing, it grew really quickly and climbed the drip irrigation pipe.

Fruit tree on the terrace!

We wanted a tree, any tree. It had to be a large one, evergreen and preferably with flowers. We went to our favourite nursery again this weekend to look for one. We had our heart set on Champa (Frangipani), but it quite toxic to dogs. Even so, we thought of the dwarf one for the balcony. Turns out that it was close to ₹7000! No, thank you. Back to the drawing board for the tree then.

Both of us had certain criteria that we did not want to compromise on. We wanted a tree with a defined stem, hence an Areca palm was out. We wanted one with lots of branches, rather than a tiered appearance. And for sure we wanted one with flowers.

It wasn't looking good, we couldn't find anything suitable. Until he showed us a Chikoo tree. It suited our purpose completely and had the added bonus of bearing fruit!

It arrived with much difficulty as it really was very tall! Once it settles in, we can give it a prune. For now, it looks lovely from our bedroom window.

Tall Chikoo tree

Placement of the Chikoo tree